Biosearch Acquires Worldwide Rights to Non-FRET Probes Patents
Complete the form below to unlock access to ALL audio articles.
Biosearch Technologies, Inc. has announced that the company has acquired worldwide rights from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) to United States Patent 6,150,097, titled “Nucleic Acid Detection Probes Having Non-FRET Fluorescence Quenching and Kits and Assays Including Such Probes,” as well as counterpart patents in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Japan, that disclose and claim, inter alia, probes having quenchers and fluorophores that are not FRET pairs, as well as their use.
In addition, Biosearch has acquired rights to sublicense the non-FRET probes patents to companies that may wish to commercialize current and future non-FRET probe-based products.
Marc Beal, Director of Corporate Development at Biosearch Technologies, comments, “Biosearch is dedicated to the science and mechanisms of fluorescent quenching along with a daily pursuit for delivering highly multiplexed fluorescent probe solutions. FRET-based probes have a limited and finite mastery of the visible spectrum accessed by the current thermocycler manufacturers and probe suppliers. The UMDNJ non-FRET probe patents will enable Biosearch to design and market new fluorescent quenched probes for quantitative PCR and highly multiplexed fluorescent probe applications. We are very excited to be working with UMDNJ as we again prepare to move the qPCR probe marketplace forward as we did with Black Hole Quencher® (BHQ®) series of dyes in 2000.”
"Although it had been thought that fluorophore-quencher pairs for labeling molecular probes need to interact with each other by fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), a mechanism that restricts the choice of labels to only a few available pairs that interact with each other when separated by a short distance, the non-FRET probes patents licensed by Biosearch show how non-FRET label pairs that interact by forming transient chemical bonds upon contact with each other, enable a wide variety of differently colored fluorophores to be used in combination with many non-fluorescent quenchers (including novel quenchers that are designed to interact in this manner), and the resulting non-FRET probes have found widespread use in multiplex molecular diagnostic assays," says Fred Russell Kramer, co-inventor of non-FRET probes technology.
Vincent Smeraglia, Director of the UMDNJ Office of Technology Transfer & Business Development stated, "The University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey is extremely pleased to expand and bolster our successful ongoing relationship with Biosearch Technologies and announce this new licensing partnership. UMDNJ is confident that Biosearch Technologies, a central player in the probes synthesis market, is the ideal partner to enable adoption of non-FRET probes technology for a wide variety of uses in biomedical applications."
